churn

We had a couple people leave a few weeks back. Specifically, equipment operators leave from the segment I'm in at my district. To say that someone left the other segment at my district would be redundant since it's bigger and subject to a continuous drain of people that needs to be constantly replenished. Since my segment has fewer people in it, when someone leaves, the impact is much more noticeable. When a couple people leave within a few days of one another, it hurts operations. When it happens the week my manager is out of town, it makes me miserable. At this point, we've weathered the worst of it and made it through a couple of really busy stretches. Adjustments have been made and new people have been brought in and more are on the way as well. However, there will always be busy stretches and then quiet stretches and anyone who actually pays attention at work can see that it all averages out in the end. Nonetheless, there will definitely be a trend towards more work for us in the coming months.

The interesting thing about the people who left is that some of them have already expressed regret about leaving to various people still here. That is the disease of Farmington. It might be an oilfield thing, but I suspect otherwise since I've been told that some districts don't have this problem. The problem being churn, and a damn lot of it. This district has a high turnover rate (specifically for operators) and I have to believe that every similar service company in the area has the same problem. There's a revolving door around here. Countless times, I have seen people come and say that we suck (more or less) or some other company looks better and so they will leave. Then you'll hear that they've left the company they went to for another one. And then another one and so on and so forth. After a while they might even end up here again. Obviously, the problem wasn't us, it was them, but that becomes a problem for us. There is a core of good people that we have that rarely changes. Rarely does someone in that core leave, but it's also very difficult to find good people to add to that core. Most new people are of the high churn variety and can unfortunately be expected to last not more than a year at best.

If you're wondering what it most cost to train all these new people all the time, (especially for us given the driving and safety practices we have) you're right to do so. We probably spend a lot more on training than any of the managers want to, but that's the cost of operating in an area where there is such a dearth of employable people, especially during an upward swing in the driving industry of the area. To paraphrase one of our supervisors, anyone who wants a job in this town has a job. If you aren't working then you must not want a job because even a convicted felon could probably get a job working on a rig.

Getting back to our regret-filled former employees from a couple paragraphs ago, why on earth did they leave if they already want to come back? The answer is that someone sold them a lot of crap. Someone somewhere managed to convince them that the grass was greener on the other side with more money or better benefits or better hours or whatever. My experience has been that most of the stories people tell about how much more they make are poor representations of reality at best and straight lies at worst. Yes, the offer down the street may be more per hour, but maybe you won't get to work as many hours or perhaps the benefits are lesser. Even if it is actually more money, maybe you have to leave town all the time for work or maybe everyone there is a total jerk. That latter one is apparently fairly common from what I can gather.

I know we don't pay our operators the best wage in the area. In fact, it's probably towards the low end of the spectrum. But apparently we offer one of the better work environments for this type of business. At first I was surprised to conclude that we're a friendly and cordial (relatively speaking of course) place to work. As I've given it more thought, the reason the people who are here like being here is almost universally the people. We have a good group of supervisors that the operators report to directly and interact most frequently with. Sure, there's the usual amount of crap that gets dished out to new people, but it's not much. For the most part, the trash-talking goes on between more veteran employees. Besides, new field engineers probably get more flak than new operators when they first start, but field engineers ought to be better equipped to deal with a little mockery. If they can't, then they're probably the wrong person for the job.

Other positives that I see are that management is accessible without being too meddlesome and we have good process control, at least in my segment. By that, I mean that we don't screw up in a major way very often which not only makes more money for the business, but also makes people feel better about their jobs when they know they are being given a chance to do a good job. We don't leave our people to twist in the wind by giving them a bad setup and if something does goes wrong, management support is there.

It's nice to hear that people are thinking about coming back but it puts my manager in a tough spot. Getting good (for the most part) people is hard and anyone with experience is even better. However, taking deserters back with open arms sends a conflicted message to everyone. We don't want to encourage people that they can just leave to test the waters whenever they feel like it and still have a job waiting for them if and when they return. But we do want good people and don't want to turn someone away for what they've come to realize was a poor decision. Oh well, we'll manage, we always do.